The Grateful Dead’s second and third albums were expensive, high-concept psychedelic odysseys that didn’t sell, putting the band deep in debt to their label. This forced them to bang out a series of low-budget quickies: a live album and two back-to-basics roots records. Ironically, this constraint produced the band’s best-loved and most iconic recordings: Live/Dead, Workingman’s Dead, and American Beauty.
Workingman’s Dead is easily the rootsiest Dead album. It’s named in homage to “Workin’ Man Blues” by Merle Haggard. (Bob Weir got his guitar part in “Cumberland Blues” from this song.) While the tunes on Workingman’s Dead are not overtly spacy, some of the tunes are still plenty weird. “High Time” is the weirdest one.
Helen De Cruz says it best: “What is happening with these chords???” What indeed. We will get to that below.
Here’s Jerry’s studio demo, which he played faster than the final version.
And here’s a live version from the 70s, played at the narcotized underwater pace characteristic of the Keith and Donna era.
The studio recording is a feature for Jerry’s pedal steel guitar. He was self-taught on the instrument, and it shows, but whatever his playing lacks in polish, it makes up for in color and imagination. Jerry would probably not have made it as a Nashville session player, but he sounds great playing hippie music.
Okay. Let’s analyze the tune. I transcribed everything through the bridge. The weirdness begins with the very first line: “You told me goodbye.” The word “told” is on a D chord, and “bye” is on C#m. There is no obvious tonal relationship between these two chords. They could be IV and iii in the key of A, but that’s not the kind of chord movement you would put in a country song. They could also be bII and i from C# Phrygian mode, but who writes country songs in Phrygian mode? They could also be from two entirely different keys, but who changes keys in the first line of any kind of song?
On the line “How was I to know”, we get two new chords, G# and F#. These don’t bear any obvious relationship to D, but they do at least connect to C#m. Maybe we are hearing the V and IV chords in C# minor? The problem with that idea is that metrically, F# feels more like a landing place than C#m does. Maybe we’re in G# Mixolydian now? But then C#m doesn’t quite fit anymore. It’s a mystery.
Anyway, the line “You didn’t mean goodbye” takes us to A, and then to E. The move from F# to A feels like a key change. But what is this new key? There are two possibilities here. Either the A and E are IV-I in E major, or they are I-V in A major. The E chord feels more resolved to me, so I guess we’re in E major. The line “You meant please don’t let me go” moves from D to A, with A feeling like the destination. So either this is yet another key change, or we were in A major the entire time? Who knows?
Can the vocal melody clarify the key centers? Not much. The phrases are so widely spaced in time that they feel like a series of independent mini-tunes rather than one continual idea. The melody makes plenty of sense if you think of each chord as a tonic unto itself (except for the G#, where the melody hangs on the fourth). I don’t think Jerry even intended there to be any particular logical throughline to the tune at all. I think he found this intriguing series of chords, identified a couple of notes from each chord to sing on, and voila.
I’m not sure where the chorus starts exactly. It’s somewhere on the line “I was havin’ a hard time”. The chorus could be starting on “havin'” or “hard.” Based only on the melody, I would choose “havin'”, but everything else in the song points to “hard.” Either way, once it gets going, the chorus is more harmonically conventional than the verse. That first line is on B to E, a straightforward V-I cadence in E major. The line “Livin’ the good life” is on A and E, IV-I in E major. The line “I-I-I-I” is on D and A, which is either IV-I in A major or bVII-IV in E Mixolydian. Finally, the line “Well I know” walks down the harmonized E major scale from A to E.
Okay, so at least the chorus makes sense. But then the little break that follows it wanders off into tonal zero gravity again. There are two bars of G and three bars of A. So, what, are we in G major and then in A major, or is the whole thing A Mixolydian, or maybe it’s all a bluesy bIII-IV in E? It could really be any of those.
The song isn’t just strange because of the chords, it’s strange because of their spacing in musical time, and the relationship between the melody and the hypermeter. I hear each hypermeasure as being two bars long. That means that the song begins on a half hypermeasure, which is extremely unusual. The hypermeasures in the whole verse-chorus unit go like this:
- You told me good- (half hypermeasure)
- bye
- how was I to
- know
- You didn’t mean good-
- bye
- You meant plea-ea-ea-
- -ease, don’t let me
- go. I was having a
- high ti-i-ime
- living the
- good life, I-I-I-
- -I, we-ell I
- know
Notice that almost all these phrases cross hypermeasure boundaries, and that the ninth hypermeasure has both a phrase ending and a phrase beginning crammed into it. If the chorus starts on “I was having”, then the section break is right in the middle of a hypermeasure too, which is unheard of. Melodic phrases are almost always neatly contained within each hypermeasure aside from little pickup notes. They certainly don’t stay misaligned with the hypermeter for the entire song.
In the break after the first chorus, the hypermeter gets very mysterious. It’s five bars long, which would seem to conflict with the two-bar hypermeter. However, this conflict would be resolved if we thought of the second verse as starting late. Listen to the line “The wheels are muddy.” I would have originally thought that the verse would start on “wheels”, but it would make more sense if it actually started a bar later on “muddy”. That would make the break six bars/three hypermeasures long, rather than five bars/two and a half hypermeasures. Also, the D chord would belong harmonically to the break. This would mean that the whole break is IV, V and I in D major. The key would change to C# minor (or whatever it is) on the section break, not in the middle of the first line.
Go back to the first verse with this idea in mind. What if it started, not on “you”, but on “bye”? Then “you told me good” would be kind of a pickup or intro, not part of the verse. The verse wouldn’t start with an awkward half hypermeasure, it would be eight hypermeasures long, which would appeal to your sense of symmetry. But then the song would have an odd intro. There is no way to group the bars without having something feeling out of joint.
Anyway, the second verse and chorus are the same as the first. The second post-chorus break is just two bars of G before going straight into the bridge. And then the bridge introduces a new and unexpected idea: it starts with a completely unprepared F chord. This makes no harmonic sense at all unless you want to hear the bridge as being in E Phrygian, which I don’t. This seems more like something Jerry discovered on the fretboard than anything he would have come up with by thinking about harmonic function or voice leading. Anyway, aside from that F chord starting off each phrase, the bridge chords are the same as the chorus, just in a different order. But there’s nothing like an out-of-the-blue shift up a half step to discombobulate your ear.
What does all of this oddity mean? Walter Everett advances some ideas about that in his chapter of Perspectives on the Grateful Dead: Critical Writings. He begins by observing that in the rock mainstream before 1980, songs always had clear tonal centers.
By this, I mean to say that when one listens to a song by Elvis, the Beatles, Billy Joel, or virtually any entry on Billboard’s top singles charts from this era, one knows where one is tonally—the pitch center is clear; one can predict the harmony on which the song will, or should, end. Throughout the song, expectations are created for pitch goals for individual phrases and sections; these expectations may be thwarted along the way, but such tonal adventures will seldom be left unresolved by the song’s end.
This is not how Grateful Dead songs work. They use conventional chords, but those chords are combined and timed in ways that feel ambiguous or maze-like. Everett sees the Dead’s spirit of harmonic adventure as an expression of their general rejection of convention and authority. Maybe! Jerry Garcia’s compositions are tame compared to, like, Wayne Shorter, but he is definitely more of a free thinker than your average rock guitarist.
Rather than trying to identify a key or modal center for each chord in “High Time”, Everett prefers to think of everything in relation to the key of E, with the verses being further out of the key and the choruses staying more inside it.
[O]ne can hear overall a slight shift of phase between the formal borders of verse/chorus/ verse and the trueness-to-scale of the harmonies: only three of the verse’s first seven chords are within the E major scale, but then seven of the next eight chords fully belong; the A and B chords over the last four bars of the verse help prepare the listener for the coming regularity of scale, and the G chord at the end of the chorus is actually a retransitional turnaround, at which point all forces tear loose from the axis to announce the return to the verse.
Everett calls the F chord in the bridge “a queasy upper neighbor to E” and “the song’s deepest tonal excursion.” He sees all the harmonic oddities as supporting the theme of Robert Hunter’s lyrics.
‘‘High Time’’ is a song comparing two states of mind. The verses describe an unstable present situation, where the singer’s partner says one thing and means another—is it ‘‘goodbye’’ or isn’t it?—while the chorus harks back to a ‘‘high time’’ when relationships had been clearly understood. The verse meanders through harmonies employing advanced alterations without a definite tonal center, while the singer complains that ‘‘nothing’s for certain’’ because his perceptions of his relationship have suddenly been shaken. In the transition to the chorus, the tonic is clearly defined; this new tonal security gives the singer a forum in which to proclaim, ‘‘I mean what I say.’’ The chorus itself accompanies the singer’s memories of his past ‘‘high time,’’ when his relationship had been solid and his understanding of the relationship had been firm.
As a teenaged Deadhead, “High Time” was not my favorite song on Workingman’s Dead. I liked the groovier, bluesier songs like “New Speedway Boogie” and “Easy Wind.” Kids from New York City are definitely not predisposed to liking country music in general. The slow tempo, less-than-smooth singing and apparent structural aimlessness of “High Time” did not help. But as a middle-aged guy with a lot of music theory vocabulary, I have come to think that “High Time” is the best-written song on the album, which would put it in the running for one of the best Dead songs period. Live and learn.
Thanks. I loved that.